Nothing Without a Little Pain
by ArouraLeona
Summary: Gajeel - is it obvious he's my favorite character? - thinks back on his early training and ponders the meaning of true strength. It occurs to him that his old way of thinking might be wrong. Slightly Gajeel/Levi. As always, T for Langauge. It is Gajeel.


Nothing Without a Little Pain

Seven long years ago, when Metalicana flat abandoned him, and he was forced to make his way in the wide world alone, he came to a startling conclusion.

Most everyone in the world? Pussies. Small, whiny, testicle-less, skin sacks who are barely able to keep themselves fed and clothed. Raised badly, for the most part. Much as he despised that bastard dragon of his, no could ever go and tell him (if anyone ever found the great disappearing bastard) that he'd raised a cowardly punk.

It never occurred to him that being raised by a dragon was odd until he saw small, fleshy children with their slightly less small, fleshy mothers. There was a fundamental difference in something raised by the hardness of a dragon and something raised by the softness of a dough-ball human.

Spines of iron weren't formed by loving and kindness. They were formed by being slammed against cave walls because you weren't quick enough to dodge the blow. It was easy to tell the ones who grew up with a fist in their face, or with nothing at all.

Abandonment and loneliness were their own special sort of cave walls to slam into.

He watched the others in the guild very carefully. He didn't know all of their histories, but he would bet his own money that Erza had a tough time of it somewhere. No gaze that steady and that cold could come from someone who grew up on a featherbed surrounded by a bevy of loving sisters and a father who spoiled her rotten. Nor would she possess such an overwhelmingly strong sense of justice if she spent her youngest years in a place where fluffy bunnies sang honey-colored lullabies and rivers ran with banana milk, and all was given for free and equally to all.

That woman had seen some shit.

All the ones that came in young had some of that in them. Cana, Natsu, Gray, Erza. It wasn't there so much on the white-haired siblings; maybe because they were a family within a family. And they got their sister back from what they thought was death so what did they really have to fear any longer?

Natsu. That was a tough one. He focused on Natsu more than he wanted to focus on the annoying prat. But it was inevitable. At the least they were of a kind, a type, the same race; not dragon, but not human either. At the most they were almost … he almost gagged thinking it, but … almost family. Like cousins. Nothing closer than that. Cousins was as far as he was willing to take the analogy.

The fire dragonslayer was younger. Was younger than he was when his dragon left him. Able to adapt better, faster, to the outside world and the presence of other fleshy people. And though Igneel's training had no doubt been difficult, it was not hard in the way that Gajeel's days were hard. The training Natsu went through was hard but not designed to make _him_ hard.

Fire had to be movable, flexible, emotional.

But Gajeel was iron. He had to know hard.

His dragon taught him that to be hard was to repel all. To be hard you first had to know great pain. Once you knew pain, you could know what to keep out. Because pain was weakness. Pain was nothing but the softness of the body bending under the hardness of something stronger. Something better.

Metalicana never acknowledged him as anything other than a nuisance until he proved he could turn back all pain. The fire, the hammer, the sword. The freezing cold. The starvation. When Gajeel proved he could handle all of it, could handle anything, and was ready for the next level of teaching, Metalicana called him 'son'.

That was probably a test too. Acceptance … affection … they were their own sort of pain.

Then, the next day, 7/7/777, he was gone. Gone.

At first he assumed it was _another_ test. Abandonment. He treated it that way. A test was something to be beat. Won. Defeated.

He set out into the weak world to prove he was harder than anything they could throw at him. He destroyed buildings, people, organizations, guilds. He was barely a teenager, if he remembered correctly. Those early years were a little hazy at times.

Then Jose found him, and he had a base to come to between acts of wanton destruction, and a way to feed himself on top of it. The only catch was that he answer to Master Jose when he called. It was annoying, but the creepy bastard was like Metalicana. Too strong for him just yet. And there were others in that guild he didn't mess with because he wasn't quite sure.

But eventually he'd prove to be harder than all them too. Better to get stronger outside where they wouldn't know the true scope of his power and then gut them from behind.

Then it happened. The event that called all of his understandings of his life into question. That quick conversation with that fire trash. Metalicana didn't disappear alone. He and Natsu together knew of two dragons, and they both disappeared at the same time. Same day.

He spent a long time thinking. Sitting. Eating. Shitting. Thinking.

Scouts from other guilds contacted him. Dark guilds most of them, since he'd done too much damage to the standard guilds in the area for any of _those _to take him in. But he ignored them all. The past seven years weren't part of some test from his dragon.

What if Metalicana was taken?

Too late if someone were trying to kill the giant, metal bastard, to go off on a rescue mission. And besides, it wasn't as if he actually _liked _him or anything like that.

But it did mean he was doing some things wrong. This not being a test, the point wasn't to prove how hard he was. Metalicana wasn't going to sweep in and say, "Acceptable. Sleep tonight. Tomorrow will be worse," like he had after so many other lessons and exercises. Even after seven years, Gajeel had still somehow expected that to happen.

But Natsu's information threw that out the window. And now he knew he would have to be here with these weak, fleshy, emotional pussies for the rest of his life. And he didn't know how that worked, exactly. All he knew was that he didn't fit, and that he had made it his goal not to fit.

His success was his failure.

But he underestimated the strength in those fleshy hearts.

They took him in. Oh, there were conditions. They used him. Had him do the hard things, the nasty things that others were unable to do. Because they were too honest. Too kind. But it seemed that was the way of things in the world of soft-killable shit. The strong did the things they could do to take care of the weak, and visa versa. Everyone had their abilities, and they used them to make shit better.

For the most part. There were still a lot of fucked up people out there. And those people were his job now.

On the flip side of that, he didn't ever have to cook for himself or wash his own clothes. People who could do that, did that.

Meeting Wendy was another surprise. She was five when her dragon left her. She adapted very well with the help of her cat and her fake guild and her own youth. She wasn't as old now as he was when he entered the world on his own. So it made sense that of the three dragon slayers she was the calmest and the most 'human'.

But … that also meant she had maybe two years of okay, very basic training with her dragon before being left on her own. Maybe three if she was a very active two-year old. Considering that, her skills were amazing.

And she had no hardness in her at all.

No. That wasn't true, but her hardness was buried under a lot of fluffy softness. She did, after all, set out alone at the age of five. Sure she found help fairly quickly, but at first she was a small child completely alone. There was strength there.

In a very short amount of time everything he thought he knew about the world – about hardness and power and pain and success – was flipped on its side and shaken until his head was dizzy with all the new information.

A few months before he would have been absolutely floored to hear the lineup the Master laid out for the s-class exams. It was bullshit that _he_ wasn't on the list, but he understood why that had to be, and the least said about why, the better.

But now he could look at the alcoholic Cana, who managed to be both hard and soft, and realize she might have a chance. That she deserved the chance. That creepy green-haired punk; he managed to wrap them all up in the Battle of Fairy Tail, didn't he? Hell of a lot of power there, even if he was a spoiled rotten little drama queen with his head up Laxus' ass.

Natsu, Gray, and Elfman were all from the same cloth basically. Hard from shit that happened when they were younger, but made flexible by this place. It was easy to think of them all as being stupid, but with no one to listen in on his thoughts, Gajeel could see that the combination of their life experiences made them strong.

Juvia. She was like Natsu. Her power was one that made her need to bend. And had a really close connection to her emotions, and emotionally Gajeel knew she'd had a rough time of it. She was one of the first people he met before joining their old guild. No one liked her, and she cried all the time.

Not that he did anything to change that; wasn't any of his business. And anyway, at the time he thought Juvia confirmed his way of thinking. She was powerful. Like freaky powerful. She never stopped using her magic, but it never wore her out. And Gajeel thought that was because of her pain. She wasn't so much hard as she was cold and miserable. That's where her power came from.

He was only now realizing that regardless of being powerful, she wasn't strong like that. She was stronger now. Stupider now, he couldn't help but think of her fawning over the ice-alchemist, but stronger too.

Though he would never say it, and he would probably never even show it if the others in the guild were around, he was thankful to them for showing him this other world. This other way of looking at each day.

Levi was probably the softest of them all outside of Wendy, and even she had some steel in her. That way she had of standing with her arms crossed. The way her mouth turned down when she was researching something in one of her books. The direct line of her eyes when she gave an order or made a request. But she was still primarily kindness. So when she was called for the exams and was struggling to tell off her two sycophants, he made a snap decision.

"If you really wanna be s-class," he said from behind her, "I'll lend a hand."

And she took him up on it. Of course she did. She might not use him like the Master used him, but she was a smart girl. It was obvious that some muscle would help her chances. He had some muscle to spare.

And more than that he wanted to be on hand for any fights involving the strongest people in the place he now called – silently in his own head – home. What a load of shit that turned out to be. Fucking ambushed on their own lands. Their island. Their exams. _Their futures. _And some fucking dark guild decides to crash the damn thing.

He'd never felt anything like it before.

That moment after Levi ran. He knew. He knew something was off. Smelled smoke in the air. Felt the earth tense under his feet. He almost lost her in that moment. Which would have been a travesty since she was the only one who could counter the cosplay samurai freak's solid script. Not that the fucktards would have killed him or anything, but having her there made it easier. At first.

Then she had to go. She had to. The others had to be told. _Their_ island. _Their_ exam. The rat bastards. He'd _never_ felt anything like it. It was different than the strength Metalicana taught him. Different than the strength in his body because his body was pretty wrecked, wasn't it?

Even now, unconscious floating somewhere between dead and alive, he remembered that feeling. That odd strength. It felt something like the way … like when Levi stood at his back as they faced off against those two fools. Warmth from outside of him, but inside of him too.

The way she'd grabbed him and pulled him out of the way. A different sort of strength. The sort of strength that collects in lots of people. Instead of just in one. With his dragon if you didn't dodge the attack on your own, then you were hit. You took the pain. The injury. Because you were your only recourse.

But not here. Not with these fluffy fleshbags. Here strength was shared, divided, loaned, dredged up from the very depths of the human wellspring in order to … to stay alive. To save lives. To make others safe. To protect.

He felt more strength then … the taste of his partner's iron still on his tongue, and his arm shot to absolute shit … than he ever had before.

He was in the black now, but he knew he won. At a cost. His arm was in terrible shape and his side wasn't exactly feelin' fantastic either.

But for some reason he felt strong. This pain wasn't weakness. This pain … it felt more like victory.

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Author's Note: Jeez, can we say corney? Lame? Freaking over-emotional? Well, I guess that's what fanfics are for. I hope someone enjoyed it! As always, please review!


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